Customer Reviews

Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art

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Telling Lives originated in a symposium on biography that took place at the National Portrait Gallery; but before publication, three additional essays were added to the original four. The contributors are Leon Edel, Justin Kaplan, Geoffrey Wolff, Alfred Kazin, Doris Kearns, Theodore Rosengarten, and Barbara Tuchman. All the essays are brief but nicely written, and this slim volume is only 150 pages long. (There is no index.)

Interestingly, the four authors who had written biographies of literary figures appear first in the volume, while the other three, who had written about non-literary figures, follow after. Furthermore, the "literary" writers tend to discuss biography on a more theoretical plane than the others. My personal taste runs to Kearns, Rosengarten and Tuchman, but all the authors provide stimulating insights for prospective biographers.

The latter can learn much even when they disagree with an author, such as Geoffrey Wolff, who argues for the importance of "minor lives"--in his case, Harry Crosby, a minor poet of the Lost Generation, who's greatest claim to fame seems to have been shooting himself in 1929. The lesson to be learned is that a biographer should not choose a "minor life" for his subject, even if (as in the case of Rosengarten), he decides to choose a representative one.